“There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places,
And desecrated places.”

-Wendell Berry, "How to Be a Poet"

Perched on a bluff overlooking the Pilchuck River, a sacred burial ground holds the forgotten stories of generations.

To the Coast Salish families who first lived here, and the American settlers who followed, it was a place of reverence and rest. In 1876, it became Snohomish County’s first official cemetery, and for decades headstones marked where Snohomish's earliest pioneers lay buried.

But within a few generations, the cemetery was abandoned. Records lost, and graves forgotten, by the mid-20th century the burial ground had been bulldozed and built over. Local memory held only faint traces of what had been.

More than a century later, a descendant came looking for ancestors—and a court order demanded the city peel back a parking lot. What lay beneath were artifacts and evidence of a past long denied.

This is a story of what the city forgot.